How to Use Persona Empathy Mapping

A workshop activity that forges alignment on user needs, goals, and pain-points, Persona Empathy Mapping bridges the gap between personas and design concepts.

Article No :1264 | June 27, 2014 | by Nikki Knox

“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”-Theodore Roosevelt

Empathy: it’s a buzzword in the UX design world. Everybody’s doing it! But what exactly are they doing? There isn’t a quick “Empathy Filter” that we can apply to our work or our team, no formula to pump out results, and no magic words to bring it forth. There is, however, a simple workshop activity that you can facilitate with stakeholders (or anyone responsible for product development, really) to build empathy for your end users. At Cooper, we call it Persona Empathy Mapping.

Empathy mapping helps us consider how other people are thinking and feeling. Typically, research notes are categorized based on what the research interviewees were thinking, feeling, doing, seeing, and hearing as they engaged with your product. It helps your team zoom out from focusing on behaviors to consider the users’ emotions and experience as well. I first learned about it from Dave Gray’s Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers and it’s gotten more press lately due to Alex Osterwalder’s book, Business Model Generation.

Image from Gamestorming.

We add a twist to the technique by focusing on personas during post-synthesis workshops with our stakeholders. We call it Persona Empathy Mapping because our process simplifies the categories to three main buckets: Think, Feel, and Do, and zeroes in on a persona within a specific situation relevant to the product domain. We intentionally push these situations to the extreme (without becoming ridiculous) to exaggerate current pain-points and challenges discovered in research.

Sketch: Persona Empathy Mapping

How does Persona Empathy Mapping help?

It reveals the underlying “why” behind users’ actions, choices and decisions so we can proactively design for their real needs—those that are difficult for users’ to perceive and articulate.

It sticks. It invites others to internalize parts of the users’ experience in ways that listening to or reading a report cannot.

It paves the way for innovative design concepts to be revealed. Now that the stakeholders understand the user’s situations, they are able to quickly understand how slight design changes can make a big impact on users.

Persona empathy mapping done on large sheets of paper.

Case Study

In a recent aviation project we pushed common challenges to the extreme (though not to the point of unbelievable or ridiculous) so that workshop participants could momentarily place themselves into a visceral experience and imagine how somebody else might think and feel in a specific context. We asked workshop participants to complete a worksheet that reflects what Dan (our persona, a pilot for a private commercial jet airline) might feel, think, and do in certain situations.

Extreme Situation Example: Dan gets to the plane and de-ices it in anticipation of takeoff. He pulls up to the hangar and finds that one of the additional passengers who was supposed to come along suddenly got sick and is currently in the bathroom throwing up.

Mock-up of completed worksheet.

We walked workshop participants through several situations throughout their customer experience in order to help them relate to and empathize with the personas we delivered. While it helped them embody and take ownership of user needs, pain-points, and goals, it also helped them mentally and emotionally prepare for the design vision we presented later that day. Because they had spent time empathizing with Dan, when we presented the design vision, our solutions intuitively made sense and resonated with the team because the participants had a deeper connection to what Dan was going through and what he needed.

Who should participate: Stakeholders, engineers, business executives, designers—anybody responsible for creating products that serve personas.

Step 1: (Time varies)

Introduce personas (or re-introduce personas if the group is already familiar with them).

Step 2: 5 minutes

Introduce activity and prepare teams.

Break workshop participants into teams of 3-4 people.

Assign one persona per team if there are multiple personas, otherwise have each team work with the same persona

Pass out worksheets or have each team create a large Empathy Map by drawing a stick figure in the center of a large piece of paper and blocking out three sections (Think, Feel, Do) around it.

Give each team a copy of the extreme situations.

Step 3: 30 minutes

Complete Persona Empathy Maps.

For each extreme situation, have a facilitator read it out loud to the workshop. Tip: Convey emotion as you introduce the extreme situation to empathize the strain/stress.

Give each team 5 minutes (per extreme situation) to flush out how their persona thinks/feels. Tip: Teams can use one worksheet per situation or one large paper for all situations (use a different color sticky note for each situation).

Step 4: 10 minutes

Reflect on results and activity.

Give each team 5 minutes to reflect on the following questions: What surprises you? What did you learn about your persona? What aspects of your persona do you want to learn more about? What aspects of your persona will impact or influence your designs the most?

5 minutes: Have each team share their reflections with the larger group.

Post Workshop Tip: Keep the Persona Empathy Maps in a visible place to refer back to when presenting scenarios/framework.

Note for experienced facilitators: A shortened version of this workshop activity can be facilitated ad hoc as needed at any design review/in progress meeting where new team members are present or long spans of time have passed since the last engagement with the personas.

Conclusion

Persona Empathy Mapping is a workshop activity that builds empathy, gains alignment around user needs, goals, and pain-points, and bridges the gap between personas and design concepts. For more information about bringing a Persona Empathy Mapping workshop to your company or other custom training programs, take a look at Cooper's current course offerings.

About the Author(s)

Nikki Knox is a Design + Education strategist at Cooper who draws from a diverse design background that includes architecture, interiors, product, and interaction design. She is committed to the design process and ways of working and thinking that reach beyond a specific deliverable.

We recommend your article in ours, in which we write about how we used psychodrama techniuqes to run proto-persona davelopment interviews, I thought you might wanna read it: https://blog.fordel.agency/marketing-persona-interview-technique-role-reversal-9191afa4f8b3#.lkb76jgcb - let me know what you think!

Dear Nikki, It is a really good article. As the UX team of Hujiang from shanghai,China, we plan to translate it into Chinese, and organize a workshop in our team. We promise: all the articles will only be used for public welfare, not for translators themselves. We will indicate the author and the original address in the translation. A accurate translation and a complete template will be send to you. Please consider our application.Email us if you recognize us or have any questions. Looking forward to your reply. laona.sun@gmail.com

I add the explicit use of a "why" section using the organizational learning framing of "assuming good intentions and reasonable logic, why would it make perfect sense for someone act this way?". This is difficult for some, especially when mapping an emotionally charged interaction since it is all too human to diminish the legitimacy of those who upset us by attributing maliciousness or stupidity.

I haven't created a sharable template yet, as the form factor really depends on the audience and how we frame it. Most of the time I sketch out the components on a white board and have participants fill it out on large white sheets of paper. The worksheet we created, above, was for a more formal setting with stakeholders that requested that type of artifact. If you email me directly, I can send you what we have.

Thank you! I just love this type of tools. I am creating a product for a group of people manifesting high change resistance, and this tool can help me to understand the impact and try to understand their motivations, as well as frustrations.